The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
South Bend's dry-years scandal was a resale market in confiscated liquor run by its own enforcers — and no bootlegging case on Lakeville ground surfaced beside it. The Indiana Historical Bureau's account names the market's centre: Agnes Szabo, the South Bend-raised "Bootleg Queen," a wholesale buyer who paid up to $2,700 in cash for 135 cases of confiscated liquor resold to her by the very officers and city judges charged with enforcing the law; Constable Dan Melloy sold her seized whiskey and once escorted her to Chicago for resupply. Arrested federally in 1921, she named names — more than sixty officials indicted, among them Gary's mayor, a city judge, a county prosecutor, officers, and former sheriffs — before Federal Judge Albert B. Anderson, who called her "an extraordinary criminal," sentenced her to six months, and then reconsidered. Her own arithmetic stands in the Bureau's telling: she claimed 75% of South Bend was in the trade. The coda prints whole: a 1923 item headlined "No more liquor for the Szabo family," and the family's later resumption of the business on a rural farm, under Anderson's injunction. The contemporary carriers stand named: the Richmond Palladium (25 January 1923), the Indianapolis Times (16 March 1923), the Lake County Times (11 December 1922), with the Bureau's blog as the modern teller. The township limb is a searched negative and prints as one: no Lakeville or Union Township bootlegging arrest, still raid, or speakeasy case surfaced's searches or in the county histories — the dry years reached this ground, on present evidence, as law and as thirst, not as a case.
Principal sources: Indiana History Blog (Indiana Historical Bureau), the Szabo essay, read November 2026; the contemporary newspaper carriers named in its apparatus; searches of November 2026 for the township limb, as stated.